that can serve to explain fighting power with unchal-lengeable authority. That said, fighting power in com-bat proficiency can be studied in exemplars through the ages. It is plausible to argue that armies reflect the leading qualities in the societies from which they are recruited. Since our society is what it is and for a while has to be, this is not a very helpful insight, true though it probably is. More helpful is the knowledge that the better fighting forces throughout history have been characterized by combat discipline, by confidence in military leadership, and by flexibility and openness to needed adaptations in the real-time of combat ex-perience in the field.27 Given that extraordinary com-petence, let alone genius, is not, has never been, and cannot be the norm among generals, plainly combat success often has owed much, if not most, to leader-ship at the tactical level, as well as to the fortunate fact of enemy incompetence. It may be morally sound as well as empirically arguably accurate, to argue that generals command the armies they deserve, and similarly soldiers are led by the generals they deserve.
Nonetheless, although armies have been let down by incompetent commanders, and some generals, in ef-fect, have been betrayed by a weak soldiery, it appears to be true to claim that generals and their soldiers tend to reinforce each other’s strengths and/or weaknesses.
The data of experience that is evidence is
unremark-ably fairly steady on this critically important subject.
There is no reason to anticipate that this subject will be altered by parametric changes anytime soon. If the essence of war is battle, its climate is unchanging as one which in its enduring nature is characterized by
“danger, exertion, uncertainty, and chance.”28 Warfare is changing tactically all the time, but there are good reasons to be confident that its human element will remain critically essential. The automation of some combat activity is not likely to abolish the necessity for boots on the ground, save in exceptional circum-stances. The goal of political control of ground and those who live on the ground, is as old as strategic history.29 There continue to be limits to the strategic and political effectiveness of threats and actions from distance. Notwithstanding the technical wonders of contemporary (and anticipatable future) body armor and combat medicine, we can alas be highly confident in the expectation that combat will remain hazardous to one’s physical well-being. Experience over centu-ries has demonstrated that willingness, if not neces-sarily eagerness, to fight at the extreme risk of one’s life is a function very much of a vital sense of loyalty, inclusively understood. Moreover, most commonly it is a loyalty strongly felt to immediate elements: com-rades, unit, possibly regiment, and particular relative-ly junior leaders. Other loyalties also figure: to famirelative-ly, tribe, clan, and nation, for example. But, the loyalty to comrades caught in the command dilemmas of sur-vival in combat tend to be dominant. Great distant ab-stractions of belief tend only to be background factors, when considered in light of the necessities of “now.”
Of course, individual motivation is typically some-what subject to group pressures to conform, even in extremely dangerous behaviors. Discipline and
train-ing, with the two intertwined as mutually dependent, can offset some lack of the “moral fiber” that may af-flict relatively unwilling soldiers, though experience has shown that there is a pragmatic discipline of dire circumstance, sometimes capable of compensating for what God may have neglected to provide in the necessary quantity.
2. Training: superior training regimes are not en-tirely reliable as keys to victory. Although rigorous training should always be a vital contributor to fight-ing power, one must never forget that war is an activ-ity that is in its very nature adversarial. This means that I could not add as a supplementary comment the beckoning thought, “but they always help,” to the title of this comment. The reason is because training that appears superior, may in fact only be training against a notional enemy who is assumed to behave in toler-ably cooperative ways, albeit in attempted belligerent competition. The French Army in the late 1930s prob-ably was trained adequately, if barely, for its domi-nant task of operating from behind the Maginot Line, which was—perhaps one should say would have been—impregnable to assault. Unfortunately, the Line was only impregnable to the ways and means of warfare of 1918.30 Training, no matter how admirably rigorous, is always in principle at risk to enemies able to behave in a manner with which the authoritative doctrine behind the training cannot cope.31 The French (and British) disaster in Flanders in 1940 was a text book example of the fatal problem for training with inappropriate doctrine. Notwithstanding the strong caveat just aired, military history reveals the general truth in this second point. Aside from the technical competence that sound training imparts, that training is a crucial source of self-confidence for soldiers, both
the tactically led and the tactical leaders. When, per-haps if, creative inspiration in generalship is missing from the action, an army well trained for competent tactical performance can provide some useful com-pensation for what is absent from its higher direction.
3. Experience and expertise: military experts in